To help get Joomla 2.5 ready for release in January, Joomla! is throwing a bug squashing party!!! On December 10th at 9am (in your time zone), groups from around the world will be joining on Skype and in local locations to work on bug squashing and testing of Joomla 2.5.

Here in Chicago, we do not have a local business sponsoring a site for us to meet and take part as a group. Joomla itself is offering Pizza to the local groups that are registered by Dec 10th.  If anyone is interested in hosting the bug squash, we can register with Joomla and get free pizza for those taking part. As of now, no one has tried to arrange anything for the Joomla Chicago group.

If we don't get a host, you can still take part. You can join me and many others virtually in the bug squashing chat on Skype. You have to be invited to the chat by the organizer. You should also take a look at what you need ready to go in order to do this event. There is some pre-setup that needs to happen for you to be able to help test the software.

If you have any questions, I'm going to be getting myself setup for doing testing and possibly trying to fix bugs as well.  I have one or two that I know I want to try to see if they are already fixed.

Come on and help Joomla get 2.5 ready for launch in January. Join me and many others at the Pizza, Bugs and Fun 2011 event!

More information can be found here: http://docs.joomla.org/Pizza_Bugs_and_Fun_2011

If you are interested in hosting, feel free to contact me as well. I can help to coordinate everything.

If you haven't gotten started yet, now is the time to get involved in the Joomla Chicago online community.  In just the last few weeks, there have been daily increases in activity -- and that means more opportunities for all of us to network with other Joomlaistas and expand our web skills, our web activities, and our web businesses.

Try these three simple ways to get into the swing of things:

• * log onto Joomla Chicago and update your profile to tell the rest of us about yourself
• * take a close look at all those snazzy pictures of the other members and pick a few to "friend" - it's fun!
• * follow the links to recent updates to discussion posts. Add your two cents! You'll start getting emails as other people join the conversation

Get started now! You'll be amazed a month from now to see how many great connections you've made!

What's your favorite way to interact with the Joomla Chicago online community?

Being so active within the Joomla Development Community and recently talking so much about the benefits of social networking recently I was thinking about all of the resources that I knew about that most other people using Joomla probably never knew existed. I thought I would share some of these valuable resources here with you.

For those that have a Twitter account and want to follow primarily Joomla related tweets here are a few links that you WON'T want to miss. You can follow everyone on these lists in one easy click.

Main list of Joomla Experts
http://tweepml.org/Joomla/

Some of the best Joomla Extension Developers
http://tweepml.org/Best-Joomla-Extensions-Developers/

http://tweepml.org/joomlaextensions/

Some of the best Joomla Template Developers
http://tweepml.org/joomlatemplates/

There are also 2 additional and might I add, very complete lists of RSS feeds from everything Joomla that you can imagine. 

http://start.joomlaworks.gr/

http://joomla.alltop.com/

Although this is a short list of resources in this blog post if you click on these links you will find that these links will provide you with an extreme amount of very valuable information right at your fingertips.

I suggest that you bookmark these links as they are constantly being updated and added to.

Enjoy!

I'm writing this post as this is the only way I could find out to communicate with all other members of this community.

It appears at the moment that JomSocial is more group-oriented than is community-oriented. In a sense, it breaks off the community by separating users within each group. 

Groups have all the tools to build and grow healthy communities, but if you are not part of a group or if you are a new member and would like to ask a questions and get quick response, how do you do that?

Using JomSocial now, there is not much you can do to interact with the community, besides write a blog post or the article, in order to ask a simple question. Also, if you want fast response, you should probably spam all the members with PMs. 

You would be in everybody's favor :-)

Anyway, the question I had was, should we put the link to this blog in a main menu? 

Of course we should, how else people will find it?

:-)